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Otetiani Sagoyewatha, the Seneca nicknamed Red Jacket for taking the English side during the Revolutionary War, fields Thanksgiving questions on the YouTube comedy series 'Ask A Slave,' starring its creator, Azie Dungey.

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YouTube Comedy 'Ask a Slave' Tackles the Thanksgiving Question: 'What About the Indians?'

ICTMN Staff

11/25/13

“Was your great-grandmother a Cherokee princess like mine? You can kind of see it in my cheekbones."

So launches the latest episode of Ask a Slave, the YouTube comedy series by comedian Azie Mira Dungey, an actress who spent two years playing a slave at George Washington’s plantation, Mount Vernon. So many absurd questions were posed to Dungey as she portrayed Caroline Branham, who “belonged” to Washington back in the 1700s, that she created the character of Lizzie May, “personal housemaid to president and Lady Washington,” as she puts it in her intro. “And I'm here to answer all of your questions.”

The episode posted on November 24 deals, fittingly, with Thanksgiving.

"I know you're a slave, but what about the Indians?” asks the aforementioned man whom Lizzie May dubs “Cheekbones.” “Do you know any?"

Enter the Seneca leader Otetiani Sagoyewatha (which Lizzie can’t pronounce), using the English moniker given him for fighting on their side during the Revolutionary War. What ensues is not unlike the queries recounted last summer by a staffer at the information kiosk at the Montreal First Nations Festival in Montreal.

Washington, of course, did not ask questions; he merely instructed his generals to decimate the indigenous population, “lay waste all the settlements around...that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.”